Update of bug#65101 (group groff):
Severity: 3 - Normal => 2 - Minor
Item Group: Incorrect behaviour => Rendering/Cosmetics
Status: None => Need Info
Assigned to: None => gbranden
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Follow-up Comment #1:
I'm recategorizing this as a "rendering/cosmetics" issue.
I'm aware of no standard regarding how the topic(s) of a man page should be
set. _man_(7) pages generally don't set them in bold, and _mdoc_(7) pages
generally do.
However, in recent work on _ncurses_ man pages, I have found that despite
being written in _man_(7), they generally _do_ set the topics in bold.
You are right that this _groff_ change was deliberate. I was pursuing my goal
of consistent styling between rendered groff's own _man_(7) and _mdoc_(7)
documents. In my opinion, it should be difficult to impossible for a person
reading a rendered man page to tell which macro package was used for its
composition.
Put differently, that the Berkeley CSRG decided to go its own way with respect
to man page macro package selection (largely, I think, because the _man_(7)
package was perceived, correctly at the time, to be encumbered by AT&T's
copyright, which Unix Systems Laboratories was enforcing vigorously) and its
esthetic decisions regarding man page rendering are separate concerns.
I therefore take issue with the claim "broken".
What needs to be done for this issue:
1. Further study the history of how man page topics got rendered over time,
irrespective of macro package selection.
2. Consider reverting this change to mdoc, and promulgating emboldening of
man page topic names (the comma-separated list of items before the em dash in
a man page's "Name" section) in groff's own _man_(7) pages.
3. Consider adding yet another register or string to the shared _man_ /
_mdoc_ name space in groff so that people who find the default "broken" can
change it. (Probably a string. If people are going to get their knickers in
a twist over this, might as well give them latitude to set the topics in Zapf
Chancery Medium Italic.)
_mandoc_(1) will of course continue to do whatever Ingo thinks best, with no
configurability.
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